One of the things I’ve noticed as the Flyers hit “rock bottom” here, Danny Briere’s phrase after firing John Tortorella, is that the anti-tank portion of the fan base is REALLY anti-tank, to the point where the word itself might be considered apostate. You suggest that losing might be good for draft positioning and the anti-tankers are pretty vehement in their stance, maybe a remnant of Ed Snider’s philosophy that “rebuilding” wasn’t in his vocabulary.

The other thing I’ve noticed, is that among this portion of fans, they frequently bring up the Sixers’ Process as something to support their claim. “Look how well the Process worked out for them!” That’s the general thought, that the Sixers’ rebuild failed and didn’t get them any closer to a title. By that logic, the Flyers should not rebuild because it didn’t work for the basketball team that shares the arena. That’s how the basic thought goes.

Now, a question:

How many hardcore Flyers fans do you think were paying attention to the granular details of the Sixers’ Process? I don’t think very many at all. I think The Process gets boiled down to an overly simplistic formula of:

  1. did the Sixers’ rebuild result in a championship?
  2. answer: no
  3. therefore: The Process was a failure

I disagree with this oversimplification and also think the goal of The Process is being incorrectly defined. Of course the ultimate prize is always to win a championship, but when a player-personnel executive brings a team through a rebuild, the objectives are to clear salary cap, accrue assets, draft high, and then develop talent. You can argue that Sam Hinkie successfully set this framework and did the first three things, then the coaches and players combined to fail in the fourth.


What’s important to remember is that the Sixers were the definition of mediocrity after Allen Iverson left. You had four forgettable Mo Cheeks seasons, when they barely scraped .500 and lost twice in the first round. Then the miserable Eddie Jordan season bridged the gap to the Doug Collins era, which again was .500 or so basketball buoyed by a flukey series win over a Derrick Rose-less Chicago Bulls team. They battled the Celtics in the second round, but came up short in Game 7.

The entire reason for the tear down is because they had gone through a half-dozen seasons of mediocrity and already reached a relatively-low ceiling. So the point of the Process was to take two steps back in order to then take three steps forward, and as much of a shitshow as it was at times, it did work. It really did. They won 52 games, 51 games, 43 and 49 during the COVID years, then 51, 54, and 47. Before that, the Sixers’ last two 50-win seasons were in 2000-2001 and 1989-1990.

You can argue for days about the playoff exits. We do argue about that, still. But they pushed the Raptors’ championship-winning team to Game 7 on the road, choked at home against the Hawks, and then choked against the Celtics. That’s not a Process failure. That’s the players and coaches coming up short. And sure, maybe if the Markelle Fultz draft wasn’t a bust, things turn out differently, but again, the GM who executed the rebuild was the one who provided the assets, and the ensuing failures were made by his successors. The Process ended when Hinkie resigned.

So it’s more reasonable and healthy to frame the Flyers’ rebuild this way:

  1. clear out the salary cap and get off bad contracts (they are doing this, they’ll be off Cal Petersen and Tony DeAngelo’s money after this season and then Kevin Hayes, Cam Atkinson, and some other minor hits in 2026)
  2. accrue assets (they have a ton of draft picks coming up, three first rounders this year alone)
  3. bring young players through the system and give them ice time (Michkov, Brink, Foerster, etc)
  4. then the coaches develop those guys and get to winning from there, we hope

That’s pretty much it. The Process was a fancy name for a rebuild. It just brought with it a lot of scrutiny because the 2015 bottom was farcical, and the floor went much lower than people had imagined. But they came out of it with multiple top-5 draft picks and won a ton of regular season games in the following years, then went to the playoffs seven years in a row. The players just couldn’t finish the job, twice on their home floor.

The Flyers will never be in a situation where they’re throwing five guys on the ice that we’ve never heard of. This isn’t going to be Hinkie wheeling and dealing for Jarvis Varnado and Phil Pressey, Kendall Marshall and Carl Landry. They aren’t going to draw the ire of every talk show host and every sports commentator with or without a blue checkmark. If done properly, it will look more like what the Thunder just did, a couple of under-the-radar, slightly-scrutinized seasons and then a hard turn of the corner upon exit. The Process was just hard to stomach because the nature of the losing was severe and borderline shameless. Most rebuilds never reach that level of severity.

This is, of course, all contingent on Briere making the right moves. He’s not exactly Theo Epstein turning the Cubs around after winning rings in Boston. He’s a first-time GM, and Danny’s done a good job at tearing it down and compiling assets, but now the hard part begins.

Just don’t let charged and emotional opinions about the Sixers Process influence how you feel about what the Flyers are doing. They’re moving in an identifiable direction and they’ve accepted what they actually are, and where this franchise actually is, maybe for the first time ever. And as the therapists say, acceptance is the first step to recovery.